Denis Cote Looks at a Blocked Quebecois in Curling

Despite four previous features (including the Cannes premiere Carcasses), international awards, and planned retrospectives of the 37-year-old Canadian filmmakers work, Denis Côté is only now having what he calls his first real point of entry in the States. In Curling, his interest in individuals with one foot outside of society continues with a crisp portrait of a Québécois solitary man and his cloistered preteen daughter. Côté, a former film critic, calls his latest work more mature, by accidenta description that might be surprising coming from an avowedly independent spirit whose prior films have used improvisation and documentary technique.

Curling took three years to developthere were three different producers, a lot of different readers. People were continually asking me to go back and write more and more, explains Côté, who pronounces the result more polished and narrative and conventional.

The magnificently schnozzed Emmanuel Bilodeau stars as the films retiring and secretive motel and bowling-alley handyman, Jean-François. Bilodeau, famous in Canada for playing a government minister on TV, suggested his own 12-year-old daughter, a non-actor, for the role of Julyvonne, Jean-Françoiss daughter. At first, the story was for an eight-year-old girl, recalls Côté. It was full of clichésshe was talking to her dolls. Instead, the sallow, bespectacled, pubescent Julyvonne communes with a snowbound cache of dead bodies she finds in the woodsher primary diversion apart from the occasional pop-music-listening sessions granted by her extraordinarily protective dad.

The morbid serenity of the drive-by rural settingan ambience heightened by bleached film stockdovetails with Côtés vision for the odd duo. I really wanted to have these half-dead characters. They need an encounter with death in order to go toward life, he says. [The father] is a loner among the loners. And in Quebec, its easy to identify with a reality like that: You can hide secrets for a very long time. Even though [the film] was really shot 20 minutes away from downtown Montreal.

Côté quotes Aki Kaurismäki on small-town resonance: The more local you are, the more international you talk. Indeed, the films title refers to the big-in-Canada team sport that catches Jean-Françoiss eyea pastime resembling bowling on ice that involves what looks like giant buffed paperweights and whisk brooms. Its the only time the character is interested in something, says Côté, who also notes curlings social possibilities. But: Its probably the most boring sport in the world.